Haylie looked back at her great-aunt. “Aren’t you the one who made the gingersnap cookies? They were awesome. And you had a cat named Puddles.”
Aunt Blanche tucked a white strand of hair behind her ear, revealing a large gold hoop in her lobe. “Puddles is still around, too, though she’s not so quick to catch mice now. What’s your best event? Your mother was an ace freestyle swimmer, but she couldn’t do a decent butterfly to save her life. I won the state event back in my junior and senior years.”
“That’s my best event, too, but I’m working on my butterfly.”
While Haylie chatted with her aunt about swim times, Mallory moved closer to Kevin. “I can’t believe you got her here. Thank you.”
“I thought she’d be good support for you.”
She couldn’t look away from those warm brown eyes. She wasn’t sure their history could ever really be over.
“What’s this I hear about you taking over Edmund’s mail delivery?” Blanche demanded. “You’ve got talent with your jewelry, and Kevin tells me you just made a big sale that will really establish your name. Seems foolhardy to throw it all over just to poke around.”
Mallory glared at him, and his face colored a bit, though he didn’t meet her gaze. So that’s why he’d gone to fetch Aunt Blanche. He brought in reinforcements.
“None of us want you hurt,” he said. “I’ll look into this. So will the sheriff.”
Why was he so set on getting rid of her? But the bigger question was, why was she so determined to stay? It was much more than finding her father’s killer. It was about finding herself again, but that would seem silly to her aunt and to Kevin. Luckily, she didn’t have to answer to either of them.
She put her arm around Haylie and took her aunt’s hand. “The service is about to start. Let’s get seated.”
Mallory had a fistful of gorgeous sea glass after a day strolling the rocky shoreline with Haylie and Carol. She should have been tired, but she was too wired to sleep so she decided to see what she needed to do to start delivering the mail. The knob to Dad’s mailroom turned easily under her hand. She opened the door and flipped on the light. Strange. He’d always kept the room locked.
Carol followed her into the small, cramped room overflowing with metal filing cabinets. “Tell me what we’re looking for again.”
The place hadn’t been painted in years, and the tan paint was even dingier than Mallory remembered. The old wooden desk, as big as a dinghy, took up most of the northwest wall. Envelopes, pencils, file folders, and wire baskets covered every bit of the surface. She frowned when she saw all the envelopes on the worn wooden floor too. Someone had ransacked the place.
“It looks like somebody emptied the baskets of mail on the desk and floor. Someone was looking for something.” Mallory stepped to the desk and stared at the jumble of envelopes, then flipped open a green file folder. Empty. She riffled through the other folders. “Every folder is empty. Dad never would have left it this way.”
Carol pulled open a filing drawer. “This is empty too. I think all the files are here on top of the cabinet.”
“This just proves that whatever happened to Dad might have had something to do with the mail delivery. I’ve been approved to fulfill his contract with the post office. There should be a mail schedule around here somewhere.”
Carol pushed her brown bangs out of her eyes and shook her head. She was already in her pajamas, blue fleece ones, and her bare feet peeked out from under the too-long pajama pants. “It will take all night to put this room back together.”
“You don’t have to stay up. I’ll work on it.”
“I’ll help for a while. I’m not sleepy yet. This is a little scary. What could someone be looking for?”
“I don’t know, but I’m going to find out.”
“Should we call the sheriff about this?”
“Probably, but I don’t feel up to dealing with more questions tonight. He already knows we’ve had a break-in.” Mallory took out her phone and snapped several pictures from different angles. “He’ll be able to see what it looked like before we cleaned it up. I think we should organize the mail first. Dad typically used the metal trays to sort it for the various islands.”
Mallory sat on the cracked plastic seat of the office chair and scooped a space clear so she could set the trays out. She grabbed a pile of envelopes and dropped them in the baskets by location. Folly Shoals, Swan’s Island, and Frenchboro.
Carol knelt to scoop the envelopes on the floor into a pile. “So, tell me about tall, yummy, and handsome. The chemistry between you was as thick as the fog out there tonight.”
Mallory’s pulse blipped, and her chest felt hot as she wheeled around in the chair to face Carol. “Until a week ago, I’d convinced myself I hardly remembered Kevin. He was part of a past too painful to talk about or remember.” Her throat thickened and she swallowed. “But maybe it will help to talk about it. W-we were engaged.” She rubbed her forehead. Not now. She couldn’t go there right now. She took a deep breath, then exhaled slowly. “I’ll tell you about it another time.”
Mallory turned the chair back around and felt paper against her foot. This was going to take forever. She rose and pulled the chair out so she could crawl under the desk. There were half a dozen envelopes on the floor by the back left castor. After scooping them up, she started to back out but whacked her head on the drawer above her. She heard an odd click, then the drawer dropped down and she had to duck to avoid it hitting her in the head.
“What on earth?” she muttered.
“What’s wrong?” Carol crouched down to peer under the desk at her.
“I think it’s a hidden drawer.” She rotated so she could sit down and face the chair and Carol. From this angle, she could see into the desk if she had enough light. “There should be a flashlight in the top filing cabinet by the door. Can you grab it?”
Carol nodded. She returned and crouched down to hand the flashlight to Mallory, who flipped it on and shone the light into the recesses of the hidden drawer.
“There’s a thick sheaf of papers here.” She pulled them out, then crawled out from under the desk. The dust tickled her nose and she sneezed.
She tried to tamp down her excitement. It might be nothing, but why would her father have hidden these papers unless they were important? Sitting at the desk, she unfolded the papers and began to read. “These are just my adoption papers. They’re interesting because I’ve never seen them before, but I don’t think they matter now.”
“You’d mentioned you were adopted. Have you ever thought about finding your birth mother?”
“After Mom died I thought about it a lot, but I couldn’t do it.”
A thousand times she’d tried to imagine what that search might look like. Would she find other siblings or maybe just a mother who didn’t care? It was too dangerous to contemplate.
“Don’t be such a ninny, Mallory. I’ve never known you to be a coward. It might be time to look for her. You never know what kind of blessing she might end up being to you and Haylie.”
Mallory sat back and looked at the papers. “I don’t really want to know about her. She gave me away. That said it all.”
Carol winced. “That’s a sweeping statement. At least she didn’t abort you, and she could have.”
“True.” Her father had said for her to find her mother. Could her birth mother have something to do with this?
TWELVE
The dull roar of the ocean hitting the rocks was a background noise Mallory barely noticed as she spread the papers out on the desk. She hadn’t yet touched the packet of letters under the folded sheet that spelled out the details of her adoption. “The names are blacked out, and even the year. October 11 is the date of the final approval though. Mom told me I was two weeks old when they got me so that would make the year 1981.”
“They were lucky to get an infant. That’s not so easy. What did your mother say about it?”
“We didn’t talk about it a lot. I me
an, I always knew I was adopted. I don’t have a conscious memory of when my parents told me.”
“What’s going on?” Haylie stood blinking sleepily in the doorway.
Oh boy. Mallory turned to face her daughter, who wore Mallory’s fluffy red robe. “Hey, I thought you were sleeping.”
Haylie’s hair was tousled, and she pushed it out of her face as she stepped into the mail room. “I couldn’t sleep. It’s too quiet here, and then I heard you talking.” She pushed papers out of the way and sat on top of the desk. “Are you finally going to look for your birth mom? I thought you didn’t want to find her.”
“I didn’t, but maybe it’s time. According to Mom, my birth mother was an unwed mother without a means of support who loved her baby enough to want a better life for her.”
Haylie’s brown eyes narrowed. “You sound cynical, like you don’t believe it.”
“I think you do what you need to do in life even if it’s hard. If she’d really loved me, wouldn’t she have kept me? I can’t imagine giving you away.” Mallory smiled at her daughter, who was looking more and more confused and lost. “It’s not a big deal, Haylie. Really, you don’t need to be upset that I’m looking.”
“What if finding them mixes everything up? I mean, you always said this is your real home. That you didn’t need to know more.”
“And I don’t. And in case you’re worried about yourself, you know all that’s really important. You’re Daddy’s daughter and mine. You know exactly where you came from. You’ve grown up in Bangor, you have lived in the same house all your life, and you have great memories of your father.”
“You’re old, Mom. Why haven’t you wanted to find out about your real parents?”
Old. Maybe she was in her daughter’s eyes, but she still felt like she did the summer she was twenty. She forced a smile. “I know my real parents. My birth mother and father are unimportant, really.”
Carol looked back at her steadily. “I don’t buy it. I think knowing you were given up for adoption is another reason you’re so afraid of failing.”
There was no real way of answering her friend. Mallory couldn’t deny she hated to fail or that she edged too close to perfectionism most of the time. Had it started with knowing she’d been given away? Maybe.
Haylie sat on the floor and folded her legs under her. “Well, I think you should find your birth parents. What if they have a lot of money and can help out, Mom? I’m not a kid. I know money has been tight and you’re struggling to keep the house. Maybe your real parents would want us now.”
Mallory held up her hand. “Don’t put yourself into my shoes, honey. They didn’t even know about you. And if they wanted to get to know us, they would have found us. It’s not that hard these days.”
Carol began to stick pencils in a cup. “You don’t know that, Mallory. What if you were hidden really well? Or what if they’d kept track of you all these years? There’s no way of knowing how they feel.”
She rubbed the back of her neck. “I may have no choice if I want to find out what happened to Dad.” Mallory pulled the packet of plain white envelopes banded together with a fat rubber band toward her. “These letters were with the adoption papers. I’m not sure why.”
The stack of letters was innocuous enough. They shouldn’t have made her heart pound in her chest, but they did. Her hand hovered over them. She took a deep breath and tried to quench the fear choking her. Once she opened these, she might never be able to go back to the way things were. Knowing about her past might reveal things that could destroy the life she knew now. Was she ready for that kind of upheaval?
“Mallory?”
Carol’s voice calmed her, and she picked up the packet and unwrapped the band. “There’s no return address.” Fanning through the letters, Mallory shook her head. “Not on any of them. This is the most recent postmark.”
“Maybe you should read the oldest first,” Carol suggested.
Mallory nodded and set the stack aside and pulled out the single paper from inside. “This one is postmarked April 1986, so I was five. Looking at the postmark, it probably arrived a day or two before my fifth birthday.” She cleared her throat and read the letter aloud.
Dear little one,
I like to imagine you walking the shore with your new mama. Do you love the water? I think you must love the sea and already know how to swim. Your mother says they’ve named you Mallory. I’ve called you Audra for years in my heart, so it’s hard to get used to the idea that you have a different name. I like Mallory though.
I miss you very much, and I think about you every day. Your mom says she has told you that you’re adopted. No matter what, I never stopped loving you. And I never will. You were the most precious little baby I’d ever seen. When you looked up at me with those dark eyes and curled your fingers around mine, I didn’t think I could do what had to be done. But I had to.
I hope you like the stuffed cat I sent. Happy birthday!
Love,
Your other mother
Mallory’s vision blurred, and when she looked up she saw tears on Carol’s and Haylie’s cheeks too. “I remember a stuffed kitty. I never remembered where it came from.”
“How are you going to find her?” Haylie asked.
“I don’t know.” Mallory folded the note and put it away. “I guess I have to try. It feels wrong though, like opening Pandora’s box.”
But did she even want to find the woman? A cauldron of emotions—pain, curiosity, rejection, determination—swirled through her gut. Once it was done, it couldn’t be undone.
Kevin slid a plate of bacon and pancakes across the table to his daughter, who smiled up at him and pulled it toward her. Her fingers moved along the spoon until she had it in her grasp firmly enough to feed herself.
“What are we going to do today, Daddy? Can we search for sea glass?”
It always amazed him to watch her run her fingers over the sand to find sea glass. Her fingertips knew the difference between sea glass and any other flotsam tossed onto the shore by the waves. “It’s supposed to be sixty today so we could do that.”
His cell phone chimed with a call as he reached for the ice drawer to give Fiona a couple of cubes. “Good girl.” He glanced at the phone and gave a sigh. Adelaide again. “Game Warden O’Connor.”
“He’s at it again.” Adelaide Wilson was an eighty-five-year-old widow who lived in downtown Folly Shoals. Her apartment was above Libby’s Sweet Shop and across from the fire station. She walked three miles every day and was a common sight with her red felt hat and walking stick. Kevin had changed her tire for her once, and ever since, she thought he was the only Maine warden around.
She viewed every event happening on Folly Shoals as her personal duty to report to Kevin, and she posted everything on the game warden’s Facebook page. If no one responded to her within half an hour, she called Kevin. That meant at least five calls a week from her.
“Who’s at it again?” Kevin rinsed his hands and glanced out the kitchen window at a vole scurrying through last autumn’s leaves. His remote cabin was miles from any town, and he loved living way out here, though he often wondered if he should move to town for Sadie’s sake. Getting her to and from school or to a playdate was a constant challenge with his work schedule.
“George Paschal. He’s running his ATV through Harry’s woods again.”
ATV use was forbidden on private land without the owner’s approval. Harry Harner had all his land posted and was known to go ballistic over hunters, ATVs, and snowmobiles on his property. “Harry hasn’t called.”
“I doubt he knows, but I saw George with my own two eyes.”
“I’ll check into it, but Harry is the one who should be making this call.” Kevin knew his rebuke wouldn’t slow her down. Maybe she should have been a game warden herself.
“I’ll let you know if I see him again.”
The phone clicked in Kevin’s ear, and he gave another sigh before putting it on the kitchen table. Tires crunched on gr
avel outside, and he looked through the window again to see Mallory’s Toyota pull to a stop at the side of the house by the kitchen door. She must have taken the first ferry to the mainland this morning because it was barely nine o’clock. She and Haylie got out of the car and headed toward the door.
After the funeral two days ago, she’d given him the cold shoulder, and he couldn’t say he blamed her. The last thing he wanted was to run into her every time he turned around and be reminded of the past. And what did she think she was going to accomplish by poking into things? He was afraid she’d end up at the bottom of the sea.
“We’ve got company.” With the dog on his heels, he opened the door. “I wasn’t expecting to see you so early this morning.”
“Haylie was going crazy cooped up in the cottage so I thought I’d see if you and Sadie wanted to take a drive up to Jonesport and do a little looking for sea glass.”
Haylie peered past him at Sadie. “Mom promised ice cream. There is an ice-cream shop up that way, isn’t there?” She tossed her head as if daring him to deliver any news but the one she wanted.
“Unfortunately, no. But we can grab some in Summer Harbor before we leave.” The kid’s attitude wasn’t as pronounced as the last time he’d seen her, but it still raised his hackles. Would Sadie be that contrary as she grew? “Come on in. We’re just finishing breakfast.” He stepped aside so they could enter, then shut the door behind them.
He should have emptied the dishwasher this morning and loaded up the dishes. The kitchen looked even smaller with the stove covered with pans and flour spilled across the dark-gray counter and onto the gray ceramic-tile floor.
Sadie rose with her hand still on the oak table. “Who’s here, Daddy?”
He glanced toward Mallory and didn’t see surprise, only interest. Had he ever told Mallory his daughter was blind and had a seeing-eye dog? He didn’t think so, but she might have heard it from her dad. “This is my friend Mallory and her daughter, Haylie.”
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